Page 4

My smile stays up there, frozen, like a satellite that's lost contact with ground control.

Of all the people Equinox Protective Group could have mailed me, they sent my brother's best friend. The human thundercloud. The man who has attended a decade of Mercer family events the way a ghost attends a house — technically present, impossible to engage, gone the second you look directly at him. The man who once responded to my telling a story at Thanksgiving — a good story, a story that killed — by looking at me for a second and a half and then asking Wes if the game was on.

I was twenty-two when I met him and I spent about one summer thinking he was the most interesting thing my brother had ever brought home. He fixed that impression fast. Or I thought he fixed it. Rude, but whatever. A girl moves on. A girl builds a candle empire.

And now the ghost is standing in my barn holding a tablet, a folder, and an actual laser device of some kind, looking around my life's work like it's a crime scene.

"Sloane." He nods. Nods! Like a sheriff in a western.

"Brady." I retract the handshake, cross my arms, recalibrate. "So when Wes said he was sending someone from EPG, he meant⁠—"

"Me."

"Great," I say, in the voice I use when suppliers tell me soy wax prices went up again. "That's just — yeah. Great."

He doesn't take his eyes off my ceiling, where the wide beams are strung with café lights. He's frowning at them. He's been in my barn for eleven seconds and he's already frowning at my joists.

"Those on a dedicated circuit?" he asks.

"Hello to you too. It's been, what, two years? How've you been? Me? Oh, thriving, thanks for asking⁠—"

"The lights." He finally looks at me, and okay, wow, unfair. The years have been — fine, the years have been outrageously generous to him, that's not the point. The point is his expression, which is the one you'd wear examining a suspicious mole. "Are they on a dedicated circuit, or are they daisy-chained off the same panel as your melting equipment?"

"They're on the — there's a power strip situation," I say with dignity. "A heavy-duty one. It has a little light on it."

He writes something down.

He writes it down slowly, and I swear to God he presses harder on the pen than he needs to, and something in my chest that survived two health inspections, a zoning appeal, and my mother asking if candles are "still happening" curls into a fist.

"Okay," I say, walking toward him. "Let's reset. Coffee? I've got the good stuff, none of that gas station — no? Fine. Look, I know what this barn looks like to a guy like you. But I've run this business for three years without so much as a singed apron. I've got extinguishers at every station — mounted, tagged, current. Class ABC by the register, Class K by the melters, because yes, I know wax fires behave like grease fires, and I would love it if you looked surprised that I know that."

Nothing. Not a flicker. He crosses to my melting station — my beautiful double-jacketed melters, my temperature logs hanging right there on the wall on a clipboard, which, note, means we both brought clipboard energy today — and he studies the setup, and then he crouches to look at my outlet configuration, and the silence stretches so long I can hear Wick judging both of us.

"You keep temperature logs," he says finally.

"Every batch."

"That's more than most commercial operations do." A crumb. A single crumb of professional respect, dropped from a great height. Then he straightens up and delivers the rest: "You've also got Class IIIB combustible liquid storage within ten feet of an ignition source, fabric displays overhanging your pour station, an extension cord doing permanent duty, which voids its rating, and a wooden structure with one modern egress serving retail traffic. And that's the first four minutes."

The fist in my chest tightens. "The fabric is bunting. It's decorative."

"It's fuel."

"It's cute."

"It's fuel that's cute."

"You know what—" I take a breath. Charm offensive, Sloane. Textbook. They'll study it. "You haven't even seen the event site yet. The launch is mostly outdoors, the fire pits will have twenty feet of clearance, I've rented⁠—"

"Fire pits." He says it the way other men say tumor. He flips a page in his folder. "Six wood-burning fire pits, a live pour demonstration, and a candle bar. For two hundred people."

"Two hundred RSVPs. Probably one-eighty show."

"In a drought-condition October." He looks at me. "In a county that's had four unexplained fires in eight weeks."

That lands somewhere I don't expect. Because yes — everyone in town has been talking about the fires, the dumpster behind Hollis Feed, the shed out on Route 9, but talking about it the way you talk about weather, roads, whose kid made varsity. Background noise. The way he says it, it doesn't sound like background noise. It sounds like a countdown.

I push that away, because he's not here about those fires. He's here to decide whether my launch — the thing every dollar and daydream I have is riding on — gets to exist.